When some people graduate high school they get voted 'Most Popular' or 'Class Clown.' I was voted 'World's Next Leading Terrarist.' Somehow everybody got the impression that I liked to set stuff on fire and smash things and intended to cause global chaos once I got loose after senior year. In light of recent events some might argue that I've missed my chance, but Osama bin Laden's just the flavor of the month. The world's leading terrorist is still the one that was in the lead when I got the award.

Despairing that I would ever have sexual intercourse, I used to tell my friends that if I didn't get laid before I was 30 I would destroy the world. I don't know how much incentive this gave them to set me up with girls. My friend Tim tried to get me laid by this chick named Claudia. This involved the three of us going to a parking lot in Tim's truck and Tim making himself scarce. Once alone, she and I talked about nothing until Tim eventually came back. It seems he omitted one vital component of the plan: I was supposed to force myself on her to get it started. I couldn't do that, I told him later. I didn't have it in me. Tim shook his head ruefully, knowing that I was indeed never going to have sex.

I was steered towards another girl named Patti who was notorious for being easy to fuck. I contrived to have a study hall with her in order to get closer to her. We ended up being friends instead-- the question of fucking was never even raised --I was too shy to mention it and it never occurred to her. This happened with every girl I was attracted to in high school.

The only girl I kissed in high school was Sherri. We saw each other in the halls during my senior year. She was tall and boxy, her teeth interestingly snaggly, and her hair was in a style not seen since the 1940s. When we met she practically leered at me. I was confused but couldn't resist. It was easy to see she was interested, because everybody else wasn't. The contrast gave her away. We went to a movie and made out in her car afterward, in the parking lot of Desoto Square. I grabbed her breasts a couple of times, but being a good girl, or wanting to seem good, Sherri moved my hands away. That was fine. No need to try it all at once. That was round one.

A few days later we went to the beach with Sherri's sister and her sister's friend. Sherri and I waded out into the ocean. Mindlessly horny, I grabbed her ass beneath the water a couple of times. She yelped and darted away, and tried to pretend it hadn't happened. I didn't understand what the problem was. Once we were back in the car she was so obviously creeped out that I was never so presumptuous again, with anyone. We didn't go out again.

Once I got to college I became convinced that I was in love with Lisa Stover. She was a year behind me, and was another girl who I'd wanted to fuck but who I'd become friends with instead. She knew what I was interested in, and in the notes she passed to me she was very careful to demarcate her interest as firmly within the friend zone, as Chris Rock called it.

I met Lisa through her brother, Richard Lee, who was a friend of mine for a couple of years. We were both kids that everybody else hated. He abruptly terminated the friendship when we were juniors, and would only state "We've got to have other friends," when I called and asked him what the hell was up; in person he wouldn't acknowledge my presence. Maybe he thought I was queer for him. Ditching me appears to have had the opposite effect intended, in that I unexpectedly fell in with the popular crowd, while Lee was all alone.

I kept talking to his sister, though, partly to query her about Lee, and partly because I lusted after her. She was dark-haired, gamine, short and curvy, and kept her enormous, firm breasts wrapped in a tight white t-shirt underneath a leather jacket. Lisa was also obviously intelligent but didn't let it drive her into geekdom. She wore a perpetual smirk and seemed unflappable; she seemed BAD and could barely be bothered to conceal it. I longed for her to use me. A couple of times when I slept over with Lee, I'd get up in the middle of the night and sit on the couch facing the hallway, hoping for Lisa to get up to use the bathroom... in my fantasies she saw me there and came to talk to me, instead of being spooked by her brother's weird friend peering at her in the darkness, and brought me back to her room where she divested me of my obligation to start Armageddon. When I finally caught her, she came out, used the bathroom, and went back to bed without noticing me. Despair.

Lisa told me Lee hadn't liked how I insulted him all the time. I hadn't thought anything of it. He insulted me, too, the way friends diss each other as a sign of affection. Lee didn't see it that way.

In college I continued to go out of my mind with lust, surrounded by women who didn't know I existed. There was an occasional respite when Tim and I ran back to Bradenton to visit friends who hadn't graduated. We came back for homecoming, and while trespassing on school grounds I ran into Lisa again. I was obviously, scarily pleased to see her again and I asked if she had a date for the dance. She told me she and her friends were going by themselves, but I was welcome to come along. I was an honorary girlfriend.

I turned up in black jacket and jeans outside the drugstore where Lisa's friend Teresa worked. We didn't spend more than fifteen minutes at the dance. After we cut out we spent the evening in the time-honored teenage pastime of driving around looking for something to do. The new Ozzy album was blasting out of the stereo, making the smoky interior dance. Lisa drove and Teresa rode shotgun as I sat with another girl in the back of Lisa's tiny automobile. I was mostly a spectator. There was a stop for drinks and to make fruitless plans for the evening. I didn't drink. Maybe if I had, an evening alone with three girls might have ended more cataclysmically. Three became two, as we dropped Lisa's other friend off. Lisa and Teresa and I continued to cruise around.

Impulsively I let my hands creep onto Teresa's shoulders as I leaned on the back of her seat; her shoulderless gown left the pale skin of her neck and upper back bare. She'd seemed pleased to meet me and I decided to press my luck. She made a little mmming sound of approval, leaning into my touch, and I tried not to let my synapses short out, caressing more affirmatively. Lisa's mood was hard to read; she knew how I felt about her and she'd invited me along despite it, and so far as I knew her feelings hadn't changed. Now I had been deflected onto her best friend, who was quite happy to gather up what Lisa didn't claim. As I stroked Teresa's sides through emerald green taffeta, she guided my left hand to the peak of her breast and closed her hand around it, drawing a short, sharp breath. I thought I would die. We pulled over, and Lisa had a pensive cigarette outside as Teresa and I kissed for a minute or two. Lisa was probably bugged that girls' night out had turned into date night, was kicking herself for bringing me along.

The orange-lit canyon of townhouses comprising my grandmother's apartment complex seemed unreal as Lisa dropped me off there. Teresa wanted me... I knew nothing about her, but she was even more built than Lisa was and seemed every bit as bad. I still longed for Lisa, but she'd had every chance. Now I had a real reason to visit home.

But it never happened. Teresa seemed to be in a perpetual state of ill favor with her parents, which kept her from getting out much. And neither of us had a car. If we were going to date we'd have to rely on a friend to take us out. The friends never materialized when the time came around. Eventually she met somebody local and we lost touch. In the process I got over Lisa.